Effective keyword-based selection of relational databases

The wide popularity of free-and-easy keyword based searches over World Wide Web has fueled the demand for incorporating keyword-based search over structured databases. However, most of the current research work focuses on keyword-based searching over a single structured data source. With the growing interest in distributed databases and service oriented architecture over the Internet, it is important to extend such a capability over multiple structured data sources. One of the most important problems for enabling such a query facility is to be able to select the most useful data sources relevant to the keyword query. Traditional database summary techniques used for selecting unstructured datasources developed in IR literature are inadequate for our problem, as they do not capture the structure of the data sources. In this paper, we study the database selection problem for relational data sources, and propose a method that effectively summarizes the relationships between keywords in a relational database based on its structure. We develop effective ranking methods based on the keyword relationship summaries in order to select the most useful databases for a given keyword query. We have implemented our system on PlanetLab. In that environment we use extensive experiments with real datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed summarization method.